Book Reviews
CREATIVE PEOPLE: HOW TO MANAGE THEM AND MAXIMISE
THEIR CREATIVITY by Winston Fletcher (Hutchinson Business Books,
1985), 141 pages, £14.95, hardback, ISBN 0-09-174043-6.Winston Fletcher is a successful advertising executive and theatrical financier.He has managed, or been involved with, many people who would 留學生dissertation網beconsidered high creative performers in these fields. Before writing this book
he interviewed chairmen and chief executives of companies which arebroadly in the communications/media business (plus Sir Ralph Halpern ofthe Burton group).
The result is a document of some interest to a wide range of people whosework brings them into contact with these businesses, or who are interestedin their management. It is easy to read and, mercifully, jargon free. It alsocaptures a view of creativity in the performing arts which is consistent witha lot of other evidence. In short, this book summarises how a lot ofinfluential people think about the creativity of the top performers in theirfields of knowledge.
Some years ago (Rickards 1985) I described this as the elitist view ofcreativity. Implicitly (and in this book, explicitly) the view focuses on asmall sample of exceptional people and seeks to differentiate them from therest of the world. Here the elite group is made up of "the creatives".
Creatives are unreasonable, have poor sense of time management and needconstant ego soothing and stroking. I knew a gerbil like that once. Indeed,some way into the book I began to read "gerbil" for "creative": "Amorphousnature of gerbils", "contemporary demand for gerbils"; "need for lotsof cuddles, verbal and physical;" "gerbils require constant reassurance andencouragement", (Sir Ralph Halpern, drawing on his extensive knowledgeof gerbils in the Burton group and beyond—"Sorry, did I say gerbils? Imeant creatives.")
The elitist view of you-know-whats has to be recognised as pervasive andfascinating, yet limiting. It belongs to an increasingly discredited body of
knowledge whose other branches include great leaders, great inventors,great businessmen and great explorers. One difficulty is the temptation toequate the greatness or creativeness of the individual with the impact of hisworks. (This, incidentally, may explain why Mr Fletcher went to an all
male, all white, sample of managers of "creatives".)The non-elitist view starts from a broader perspective of human creativityas the process of persona! discovery and development. A maturing society
70 BOOK REVIEWS
recognises the varied and creative contribution of its citizens through itseducation and social practices. If this is a bit more complex than simplydividing the world into high creatives and the rest, I might just add thatthe view is not just mine, it is shared, and communicated with greatconviction by President Gorbachev in his Perestroika (1988).#p#分頁標題#e#
I would have found the book even more interesting and credible if theauthor had presented it as a collection of personal views. His credentials
(and these of the interviewees) suggest that their views are worth readingand heeding. Unfortunately, the academic "bodyguards" he recruits toprotect his case are a peculiarly mixed bunch, and his interpretation of theirviews, at times, unconvincing. He suggests that the textbook definition ofmarketing "begins with the consumer and traces back to the manufacturer",whereas " defmitionally spieaking, the creative industries areproduction-led rather than marketing-led". Debatable. An article from the
Journal of Vaiue Engineering is used as the primary source for a discussionof identifying creative talent. A book on supervisory management is
suggested as a reference for the notion of quality through quantity. Whenkey researchers are cited, such as Joseph Bogan, the work is badlymisinterpreted. Bogan and co-workers did not establish that the "two halves(sic) of the brain operate quite differently, and perhaps even separately,from each other". Their work revealed how subtle the differences are, even
after the left and right cerebral hemispheres have been surgically separated.Nor did Bogan equate creativity with right brain activity. He reported cases
of artistic decline (even in what Mr Fletcher would call high creatives) aftersuch surgery.
This is not a trivial point. The elitist school of writing has tended tointerpret creativity as essentially "right brain". Bogan pointed to theimportance of communications between the broadly logical and holistic modesof thinking in the healthy, functioning individual, including processesproducing creative artifacts. According to this view, highly creative peoplehave a strong grasp of, and capacity to analyse, reality, and a capacity toescape from it. The book artificially produces a split brain world with a fewcreative folk wandering around with a highly developed fantasy quotient,
attended to by larger numbers of "left brain" minders who are unable totranscend the obvious ways of looking at things. There is an increasing bodyof knowledge about creativity and its development and management.
http://www.ttc-switch.com/Thesis_Writing/Excellent starting points would be the collected articles in Isaksen (1988)and Stenberg (1988). One unashamedly elitist book reference, but hugelyenjoyable, is the collected wisdom of David Ogilvy (1989).
References
Rickards, T. (1985), Stimulating innovation, London, Frances Pinter.
Gorbachev, M. (1988), Perestroika, CoUins, Fontana.
Isaksen, S. (1988), Frontiers of creativity research, Buffalo, NY, USA, DOK Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (1988), The nature of creativity, Cambridge University Press.
Ogilvy, D. (1989), The unpublished David Ogilvy, Sidgwick and Jackson.
TUDOR RICKARDS